21.4: Food Additives—What Did They Put in Our Food?

People correctly associate food processing with food additives. These “chemicals” added to food have been the focus of many scare stories. But even without these stories, there is something a bit discomforting about swallowing down foods that are labeled with long lists of ingredients with forbidding names, vague purposes, and unfamiliar identities.

Whose mouth waters for a diglyceride (an emulsifier)? Who puts butylated hydroxytoluene (an antioxidant) on their grocery list? It’s an old (and accurate) observation that what we fear most is what we understand least. So let’s look a little closer at what additives are.

Suppose we begin by looking at a food’s list of ingredients—one that offers us a product containing, “Acetone, methyl acetate, furan, diacetyl, butanol, methylfuran, isoprene, methylbutanol, caffeine, essential oils, methanol, acetaldehyde, methyl formate, ethanol, dimethyl sulfide, and propionaldehyde.” The instructions are to soak this stuff in hot water, throw it away, and drink the hot water. Would you do it? Well, would you reconsider if you knew the product was nothing but pure coffee?

All the listed chemicals are merely the natural chemicals found in coffee. Such a list could be made for every food, “natural” or “unnatural,” processed or unprocessed.

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Coal tar dyes have names like FD&C red no. 40— they’re used to color Foods, Drugs, & Cosmetics.

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Many of the substances found naturally in food appear on food labels as additives. For the fact is that many of the feared additives are only food substances taken from other food sources, foods that nature has provided that help preserve, enhance flavor, produce better texture, and so on.

Additives are sometimes fortification and enrichment nutrients of questionable value. Some of these you can recognize and evaluate. For example, you might wonder if the addition of 100% of the Daily Value of so many vitamins and minerals to an energy bar is more for the benefit of sales than the benefit of the consumer.

Hundreds of additives of various kinds are used; some are listed in Table 21-1. Some are such common foods as acetic acid (vinegar). Some are familiar products used to add color, like betacarotene or chlorophyll. Some are used to change the consistency of the product—pectin from fruit, usually apples, keeps jelly gelatinous. There are stabilizers and thickeners, with the odd names agar, carrageenan, and guar—all are “gums” found naturally in plants.

There are, of course, food additives that aren’t found in nature. The most heavily criticized are the coal tar dyes used to color food. But the approved color additives have survived intensive scrutiny as to their safety. They come under particular attack because their sole purpose is for color—perhaps frivolous, perhaps not.

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Salt, sugar, and vinegar are common food additives.

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Ironically, less is known about many of the substances that give plant foods their natural color. Also, color additives didn’t come into being with the advent of yellow margarine, orange Kool-Aid, red-striped candy canes, blue Jell-O, and green M&Ms. Even the ancient Egyptians used color additives made from plants—and insects—to color their food.

The public concern with food additives is often based in part on the idea that additives serve only the processors, and that they aren’t really needed. But, generally, food additives serve the consumer as much as the manufacturer, in keeping food safe and pleasing.